. Lots of character, too.
There's nothing weak about Polly. You'll like her."

"I'm sure I shall. And what has she been about all these years?
Twenty-seven, did you say?"

"Well, family matters mostly. They've kept her pretty busy. She's the
eldest, you know. She has married off three of them already."

"Three sisters?"

"No; two sisters and a father. There's nobody left now, but these two."

It was all very like that trip on the lagoons yesterday; only, in the
one case, he had seen the lagoons through the eyes of his Pollys, while
to-day he seemed to be seeing his Pollys through the eyes of the woman
he loved. And he found that gracious sharing of his interest a balm to
the old wound, and he was soothed and beguiled into a strange new
acquiescence. It would come again, the importunate trouble. He should,
in a very few minutes, bring down upon himself that gentle refusal, more
poignant in its kindness than scorn or misprision would have been.

As he sat there touching upon one characteristic and another of his
Pollys, in the direct, soldierly fashion that cuts through ordinary
modes of speech, clean and incisive as a sword-point, he vaguely felt
that this was only a postponement, a respite. It could not last, this
extraordinary, unaccountable resignation. He was not sure that he should
approve of it if it did. But, meantime, he had not told her how the
girls had enjoyed riding on the Campagna, and how they had followed the
hunt one day, and not a bone broken! Nor how they had got to know their
way about Rome like a book and how--really, the subject was quite
inexhaustible!

The sun was shining like mad upon the palaces opposite, and as he
looked across the flower-boxes in the window, he felt quite in sympathy
with this high noon of light and color. A steamboat shrieked beneath the
window, and the discordant sound hardly seemed an intrusion. And then,
suddenly, taking him quite at unawares, a firm step resounded upon the
hard, smooth conglomerate of the broad passage-way, and--"Here is Geof!"
his mother announced. "You would hardly know him, Colonel!"

The Colonel rose to his feet and turned toward the door, guiltily
conscious that he had evaded the subject of Geof. As his eye fell upon
the lithe, vigorous figure coming toward him, he recognised the fact
that evasion was no longer possible. An instant later he had recognised
the young architect of Western proclivities whom he had taken such a
liking to an hour a